Page:Tolstoy - Christianity and Patriotism.djvu/11

 predictions and denunciations of the "false public opinion" long so assiduously propagated by the European Governments and the Press generally.

It was as though Tolstoy's warnings had been written in ink which faded before men's eyes when the Churches and the clergy of all the combatant States began blessing the cannons and the bayonets, and later the bombs and the land-mines and the poison gas. Christ was mobilized by all the Churches, but not Tolstoy.

It was, indeed, natural that Tolstoy, the great anti-militarist, should be ostracized. Even before his death, in the light of the rising sun of the Anglo-French-Russian Entente, a new school of writers in England was busy lavishing enthusiasm on all things Russian, from the Russian soul to Russian blouses. The virtues of the Russian moujik and of the Royal House of Romanov were being ingeniously intertwined in the panegyrics of English publicists and journalists. But Tolstoy, who had from the first poured scathing contempt on the conceit and vainglory of the German Emperor, William II., and his militarist prepossessions, at a time when English statesmen were coquetting with him and saw in Russia the enemy, had denounced the Russian autocracy with no less vigour. And so, naturally, Tolstoy's piercing invective, his prophetic indignation with all the shams, hypocrisies,